Introduction
Writing is a chore, which is why we are graded for it in school and paid for it at work. Think lawyers, researchers, and copywriters. You will not be graded or paid for listening or watching directly.
It is just a bonus to your arsenal of knowledge and must be packaged and converted into a product or service before you will benefit.
Long-form and comprehensive content is any blog post, article, guide, tutorial, or news that is about 2,000 words or more. It may be hard and may take longer to crank, however, it offers a positive impact on your readers and website.
It also lends itself well to certain niches such as education, technology or programming, sales pages, and sometimes email marketing. If writing is a chore, then how do you write long-form comprehensive content?
Write about topics you know much about
To be able to crank out a massive amount of words for a single article or content you must have deep knowledge about the topic you are to write about.
You will need to rely on knowledge and experience to bring out the juicy stuff of a particular subject to keep your audience reading to the end.
If you care so much about a topic and know more about it, you can pinpoint what is missing in competitors’ content and ensure to include it in yours. If you have life experience in an area, you already know users’ or customers’ pain points that you need to address in your writing.
Research valuable information you can include
Including researched materials in your long-form comprehensive content makes you authoritative, authentic, and trustworthy.
Researched materials you include must be from authoritative or professional people with unshakable reputations. The quality of the persons whose research you include in your article can also rub off on you.
Researched materials could come from interviews, books, or academic scholarly works.
Write about topics that solve a real problem for people
You can know much about a topic and can have more researched data to write content. However, if it is not something that will solve a real need for people, then you will waste your time.
Make sure you research your topic to ensure at least there are people in the world that have a need for it. Write your content for real people who have real needs and not necessarily for search engine rankings.
When you write to solve people’s problems, it will easily translate into search engine ranking success. Moreover, a million problems in the world need solving than there are solutions.
Therefore, you should never have a shortage of stuff to write about in one article or a hundred articles.
Why must you write long-form comprehensive online content?
Ranks better in Google
Google seems to favour websites that write comprehensive content and rank well in the Google search engine for more visibility. That does not mean Google will rank sites for junk long-form comprehensive content. Google AI web crawler is smarter than we may think.
Many online content creators have always been battling to rank higher in Google searches to possibly the first page of search results using shrewd tactics. These tactics mostly backfired, and the websites have ranked lower in the search engine result rankings.
Paid advertising can be expensive and cumbersome to execute and measure. Paid content promotion is not sustainable in the long run without investing more money into it.
Therefore, we all want to earn a position on Google search results that ensure we get a steady flow of organic traffic to our websites without spending a dime.
Provides more value
Value provision in long-form comprehensive online content can come from statistics, quotes, or data that is included.
Value is the perceived usefulness of the content. Google wants to promote original content that attracts more readers and provides the best all-round value to the internet ecosystem. The internet ecosystem includes internet users, content creators, and internet technology providers such as Google.
For example, when writing about a complex topic in education or health, or programming, more value is obtained by writing comprehensively on a topic for the benefit of the readers’ thorough understanding.
The comprehensive content may also be used on other social media platforms such as Twitter in smaller chunks per day or per week. This may also create backlinks to the original article for more free traffic.
A part of the long-form comprehensive article can also be used as a post on Medium for a link back and free traffic to the main larger content.
Conclusion
Long-form content creation has the most benefit for content creators who use it wisely based on their website’s topical areas and the needs of their audience. I am confident that by using these guidelines to create comprehensive content, a website could outrank a major industry player in search rankings and earn more money in the process.